Guangxun Jin | 金光勋 | 김광훈

How should I choose between a social media account and a personal website? My choice leans toward the personal website.

There are several reasons for this. First, I’ve never been particularly enthusiastic about posting everything on social media. Suddenly posting a lot in a short period of time would definitely attract attention. People around me, especially those who know me well, might feel that I’ve changed a lot or that I’m completely different from the impression they have of me — it could feel jarring. In reality, I’m not “completely changing”; I’m just trying, and working toward, becoming more true to myself. I don’t want to make a big deal of it or announce it to the world. I’m fine with letting people’s impression of me remain as it was before; I don’t feel the need — at least not for now — to prove to anyone who I really am. If I do want others to see it, I can choose to show it selectively, just like you are reading my articles right now. Or even show it selectively in-person.

Another reason is that if I posted these things on social media, I’d worry about gradually posting “for the sake of others’ attention.” One of the main functions of social media is instant gratification — showing things to people, receiving likes and feedback, whether what you post is good or bad, true or false. If I get used to sharing my experiences there, would I start prioritizing instant gratification over genuine recording? I don’t seek that instant satisfaction from social media. The records I make are primarily for myself. Of course, I’m willing to share, but I don’t want the act of recording to slowly shift into being mainly for others’ attention, losing its original purpose.

A third reason is that I want to record honestly. That means I won’t just record my “perfect” side; I’ll include my flaws and struggles too. The purpose of recording is authenticity, especially when it’s meant for myself to look back on later. If I only recorded the good parts or the perfect side, much of the meaning would be lost. That’s not what I want. Sharing the more “negative” or less polished aspects on social media can feel awkward — I can already feel the embarrassment just thinking about it ?, especially when people I see often or know well are on that platform.

Another guiding principle I’ve always followed is: don’t announce things before they’re accomplished. I believe that talking about a thing too much before it’s done can actually reduce the chances of success. I even looked this up, and there’s an idea that sharing something and receiving positive feedback gives you a premature sense of satisfaction, making you feel as if you’ve already achieved it, which can lower your motivation and make the project fizzle out. Whether or not that’s entirely accurate, I try to avoid broadcasting things before they’re complete. I might choose subtler ways to share instead.

So, a personal website clearly suits me better for recording. It doesn’t instantly notify everyone around me about what I’m doing, allowing me to record very quietly. I also don’t feel pressure from others or question myself with thoughts like, “Am I posting this for attention?” If you’ve read the reasons above, you might think I’m unwilling to share my experiences. That’s not the case — I just want to share selectively for now. Whether you’re someone I know well, someone who knows me but isn’t familiar with me, or even a complete stranger, if you find my website, it means you actively sought it out. You might not find it immediately, but with clues, you eventually did. If that’s the case, I’m very happy to share with you. You could even talk to me in real life about my experiences, and I’d gladly share. But at this stage, I don’t want to proactively share with everyone yet. I feel the timing isn’t right. When I feel the time is right, I may willingly share more openly.

A personal website also has much greater freedom compared to platform-limited social media. I can design any style I like, and post content in any form, basically do whatever I want to do.

So that’s the decision: I’ll use a personal website to record.

Before ending this section, I want to clarify something. From my discussion of social media above, you might think I see it as inherently negative. That’s not the case. Sometimes it can have slightly negative aspects — for example, people posting “perfectly curated” lives out of vanity, which may not reflect reality. But most of the time, people are genuinely sharing and recording their lives, passing on useful information, building or maintaining relationships, expressing themselves, or simply for entertainment. Instant gratification isn’t inherently bad either. For many people, social media is a very good choice for recording life.

For me, however, it’s not the best platform right now. Some of my experiences would be fine to post there, but at the moment, I don’t want to actively notify people around me or those who know me. If you want to see these things, I hope you find them yourself — even as a stranger — and I won’t restrict your access; your anonymity will be preserved. On the other hand, there are things I want to share with those verified audience, mostly people I know. For those, I would post on social media restricted to that group. So it’s not that I dislike social media; I just think certain content suits certain audiences and platforms, and I post accordingly — nothing more.

Because I hadn’t maintained my website for a long time, I felt a bit rusty. I wanted to get back the feel of building a website first. I backed up and took down the outdated site and tried creating a simpler, more streamlined personal website. I quickly got the hang of it again, and using my spare time, I managed to put it together in about a week. With that warm-up done, I could officially start.

The platform is already decided. Now it’s time to think about content. My original intention is to “become myself.” While it’s not a complete 180-degree transformation, its essence is still “change.” And it’s precisely because I decided to change that I came up with the idea for this website. So the theme should revolve around “change” to some extent. Since the overall theme is “change,” the site should reflect both how I was before and the process itself. This means including a basic self-introduction and documenting the process of change.

However, if the focus on “change” becomes too heavy-handed, it risks feeling forced and losing the original purpose of simply recording things. To avoid this, I present the process of change through the form of storytelling. These events carry their own significance within the overall process but are presented in a relatively light and approachable way — these are the “real experiences.”

I also think it’s necessary to write down changes in my thoughts, because they concretize abstract ideas. Tracking these thoughts means I don’t have to force myself to reflect and summarize each time. Thoughts realized later aren’t necessarily the ones I instinctively act on yet. Having reminders in this form can serve as helpful guidance until I fully internalize them — and that’s exactly what “thought-based content” can do.

So, my current plan for content is to focus on change as the theme, record some of my experiences in a relatively light narrative style, and supplement them with small thoughts as prompts for myself. This way, I can track, reflect, and summarize myself. Of course, I may change my mind later and switch to other types of content, but for now, this will do.

There are also things I want to record purely for memory or as markers of my personal growth. But I don’t think these are suitable for a semi-public personal website. Some may be posted later on media accounts with fully verified audience, while others might be recorded in completely private spaces.

Every event has a reason, a process, and a result. But when it comes to website content, I’ve only focused on the cause and the process, not the result. Personal growth doesn’t really have a clear endpoint; I might mention small outcomes along the way, but these can only serve as minor milestones. I probably won’t write about the final result because I don’t know what the endpoint is. Maybe it’s like fitness: you keep doing it, keep gaining the everything it brings, but you never really know where it ends.

At first, I expected the main challenges to be in the process of building the website itself — things like design and the actual technical construction. But once I started, those turned out to be not so difficult. Although it took some time, it went fairly smoothly. When I built websites in the past, I really enjoyed writing some simple code myself or modifying others’ code. Writing my own code takes time, but it’s not a bad thing. Deeply modifying someone else’s code, however — especially themes or plugin code — is usually not recommended. Themes and plugins are frequently updated, and major updates can overwrite any changes you’ve made, meaning you’d have to redo your modifications from scratch. This can be very time-consuming, and some website features might not work properly during that period.

For this site, I tried to stick as much as possible to the original code of themes and plugins. Where changes were needed, I used safe methods that wouldn’t be overwritten during updates. Of course, the extent of such modifications is limited, but it greatly sped up the process. The only thing that took a bit of time was searching for the right plugins.

Instead, there were two main challenges in building the website.

The first was finding the time to work on it. Initially, I thought I could work on the site casually whenever I had free time after finishing everything else. Even if I didn’t get much done at once, I thought I could complete it gradually. In practice, it turned out differently. I have a full-time job, regular workouts each week, other personal activities, and daily chores to handle, plus the need to restore my energy and focus. In this context, even if I had physical energy, working on the website could still be mentally exhausting, which made it more difficult to start working on the website. In fact, this mental fatigue is tied to the second challenge.

The second challenge was the need to write a large number of articles. Honestly, the process of designing and constructing the site itself didn’t feel particularly difficult. Even if I wanted a break, I could handle it without much mental pressure. Once the design is set, the construction phase doesn’t require deep thinking — you just follow the design step by step. But I found progress harder to make when I actually started filling in the content. Writing these articles not only took much more time than I expected, but it also required deep thinking and repeated review.

In the beginning, I even considered writing the articles in three languages — English, Chinese, and Korean — and adding a language switch option on the site. Looking back now, I won’t pursue that for the time being. Writing a large number of articles already takes a lot of time and effort, and adding two more languages would be overwhelming. Perhaps in the future, if a better solution presents itself, I can reconsider.